Not every citizen in this country is treated equally before the law.
Days after the verdict was delivered, this is what the woman actor sexually assaulted in 2017 had to say
Her words were not addressed to the court, or to lawyers, or to the media.
It was addressed to the public.
Six men were convicted for abducting and sexually assaulting her inside a moving vehicle.
At the same time, actor Dileep, the man the prosecution accused had masterminded the crime, was acquitted of all conspiracy-related charges.
One verdict and two sharply different outcomes.
And almost immediately, Kerala split down the middle.
For some, the conviction of the six men was proof that the justice system had worked.
For others, Dileep’s acquittal, combined with what they saw as minimal punishment for the perpetrators, felt like a deep moral failure.
There were protests on the streets and outside film venues, at film festivals and cultural events.
Inside buses, where passengers asked for Dileep’s films to be switched off.
And online, where many put forward questions or simply the hashtag avalkoppam - meaning ‘with her’.
Again and again, the same questions surfaced.
How can a crime be proven, but the conspiracy behind it disappear?
How must one look at what transpired in court while reading the judgment?
The verdict has divided the state, not because people disagree on whether the survivor was assaulted.
The court itself says the crime happened.
But because people disagree on whether the full truth was acknowledged.
So what exactly did the court say?
What did it accept, and what did it reject?
And why is proving criminal conspiracy so difficult in Indian courts?
Let me explain.
The sessions court judgment runs over 1,500 pages.
Its conclusions are careful and sharply drawn.
On one question, the court leaves no room for doubt.
The survivor was abducted. She was sexually assaulted inside a moving vehicle. The assault was filmed.
Six men carried it out.
There was medical evidence, forensic material, the survivor’s testimony, and the memory card containing the visuals.
On all of this, the court was unequivocal.
The judgment says it accepts survivor’s testimony about the assault.
But inside court, during the trial, even that testimony was questioned.
Defence lawyers asked the survivor why she was traumatised for hours if she was bold and courageous.
One lawyer asked why she didn’t jump out of the car when it must have stopped at traffic signals.
That a woman is expected to jump out of a car and then not be scared of six men was perhaps the logic
The court explicitly rejected these arguments
Even a woman who is otherwise bold and courageous can collapse under the weight of trauma.
Rape does not follow logic, and shock does not behave rationally.
No one, the court noted, seriously disputed the survivor’s statement or the video and scientific evidence.
But while the survivor’s testimony was used to establish the crime, the court applied far stricter scrutiny when she spoke about power equations and threats.
For example, the survivor said during the rehearsal for the Dileep Europe show in May 2012, she and Dileep did not speak to each other as the tension was high.
The court said- It is very difficult to believe that there was no conversation between two leading performers during the rehearsal camp of a programme.
The survivor also said that when they reached Europe, Dileep talked to her in a threatening tone on the bus.
But the court disbelieved the survivor here also
The court said if Dileep had threatened, someone would have noticed.
She is a leading actress and she could have disclosed it then and there says the court. And it rejected the survivor’s testimony
The judgement instead quotes another witness Nadirsha, Dileep’s close friend- who was declared hostile by the prosecution. He said everything was fine during the Europe show and they were all like a family
When it came to witnesses who deposed saying Dileep was angry with the survivor for disclosing his extra marital affair- witnesses like Manju Warrier and Geetu Mohandas- the court had many questions.
Why were certain details mentioned only in cross examination?
Why were they not in earlier police statements?
Though a witness can introduce facts during a cross examination, the court did a minute detail by detail comparison between their statement to the police and in court.
For example, the court says Manju did not tell the police she contacted Dileep and Kavya after she spoke to the survivor.
But we checked Manju’s statement to the police.
Her statement to the police shows Manju has mentioned contacting Dileep
But she didn’t mention calling Kavya.
In Geetu’s case the court says she did not tell the police that Manju saw messages between Dileep and Kavya.
We checked that police statement too. Geethu has mentioned the messages.
But in her police statement, it is evident she did.
These findings will most probably be challenged in the high court.
This story didn't begin with the verdict, and TNM has stayed with it since day one - through the investigation, the trial, and now the judgement.
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The next part of the judgment is regarding a show in April 2013
The survivor said during the show, Dileep’s friends told her he was very angry and unhappy with her.
This is where almost all witnesses were declared hostile.
Including the survivor’s friend Bhama and Siddique.
The judgment however accepts Bhama’s and Siddique’s statements that they never spoke of Dileep’s anger.
The judgement reasons that Bhama, Siddique and others are friends not just with Dileep but with the survivor too- placing Dileep and the survivor on the same footing.
And then the judgment says- because of this friendship- there is no reason to disbelieve their testimonies against the prosecution.
There were two witnesses who told court that Dileep did have a problem with the survivor - make-up artist Renju Renjimaar and producer Jeevan Nasser. Their testimonies were rejected citing various reasons including late revelations and the inability to remember exact details.
The survivor’s statements that she lost chances in cinema because of Dileep are mere oral testimonies. They are not backed by proof, the court eventually concluded.
So the motive- as I explained- could not be proven using witness statements.
As far as the actual commissioning of the crime goes, the judgment runs into hundreds of pages, questioning the way the evidence was collected, whether some of it was planted and rejecting almost all of it on multiple grounds.
This tension runs through the judgment.
And it is one of the reasons the verdict has unsettled so many people.
Because it shows how the law can believe a survivor about violence, but still doubt her account of power.
To understand why, we need to talk about criminal conspiracy.
Under Indian law, conspiracy is rarely proved through direct evidence.
There are no contracts, no written instructions, no paper trail that says a crime was ordered.
Instead, courts look for a chain — conduct before the crime, conduct after it, meetings, phone calls, money trails.
If even one link in that chain breaks, the benefit of doubt goes to the accused.
We have seen this before.
In the Sankar caste killing case in Tamil Nadu, a Dalit man was hacked to death in public for marrying outside his caste.
The men who carried out the murder were convicted.
But the man accused of orchestrating it — the woman’s father — was acquitted by the High Court.
Because the prosecution could not conclusively prove conspiracy.
The court said the chain was incomplete.
That pattern repeats itself in conspiracy cases across India, and it played out again here.
In the actor assault case, witnesses mattered enormously, and many of them collapsed.
Twenty-eight prosecution witnesses turned hostile.
Hostile witnesses do not automatically mean the truth disappears.
But when this happens at scale, it weakens the prosecution’s spine.
The prosecution also has to do some serious explaining on whether the case lacked material evidence or were they simply not able to present it well in the court
Because criminal trials are also about appreciating evidence
The court has discarded several pieces of evidence the prosecution relied on.
A handwritten letter allegedly written by the prime accused, Pulsar Suni from jail, addressing Dileep and suggesting that this was a hired crime.
Call data records that showed contact, but not agreement.
Meetings that were alleged, but not independently corroborated.
Electronic evidence that failed procedural tests.
Even revelations made years later were treated cautiously and rejected as inconsistent, delayed, or procedurally weak.
This is how conspiracy cases often fail.
Not because nothing happened, but because not enough can be proven to the court’s standard.
What leaves us most uneasy about this judgment is that it concludes Pulsar Suni and driver Martin hatched the conspiracy
The judgment nowhere mentions the possibility of a powerful conspirator unmasked
The law does not operate in a vacuum.
This verdict arrived in a society deeply aware of power — of who gets believed, and who is expected to prove everything, again and again.
Kerala has seen this tension before.
In the Franco Mulakkal case, where a nun accused a powerful Bishop of rape.
Her testimony was dissected for inconsistencies and her delay in reporting was questioned.
Her continued interactions with her abuser were used to cast doubt.
That acquittal too divided the state.
Not because people did not understand reasonable doubt, but because women recognised something else.
The emotional cost of disbelief.
The sense that judicial reasoning can sometimes mirror social morality — where silence becomes suspicion, and survival itself becomes a question mark.
This is the context in which today’s protests must be understood.
They are not just about one verdict, or one actor.
They are about accountability.
About whether systems of justice can truly see power, and about whether survivors must always be perfect to be believed.
And now, everything moves to the appeal stage.
Appeals by the prosecution and appeals by the convicted.
So where does that leave us?
With a verdict that may be legally reasoned by some, but socially destabilising.
With a survivor who says justice feels unfinished.
And with a public that refuses to move on quietly.
➡️ Read our coverage of the case here: https://www.thenewsminute.com/topic/tnm-special-stories-kerala-actor-assault-case
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Produced by Megha Mukundan, Script by Lakshmi Priya, Edited by Nikhil Sekhar ET, Camera by Ajay R